The Last Buggy Factory

       On the Ohio River edge of Lawrenceburg, Indiana, is a ramshackle factory which by all the rules of the business world should be dead. The Standard Vehicle Company, maker of buggies for two generations, however, refuses to die, although malnutrition has long since set in. 

       The world has for forty years been gradually but surely moving away from this buggy factory. Ed Knapp, owner of the company, with one foot in the present and one in the past, refuses to admit that his is an unnatural or uncomfortable position. He insists that he can bridge the gap. His small staff of multi- skilled workmen still turn out more than three hundred buggies a year for customers in all parts of the nation. His factory is the last relative of buggy plants which in 1914 included well over eight hundred competitors. 

       When you go to Lawrenceburg looking for the Standard Vehicle Company it is wisest to stop in town and ask directions, for a stranger would have trouble finding the factory and trouble recognizing it when he did find it. 

       Time has dulled the red brick walls of the rambling three-story building and smoke and soot from the railyards across the street have blackened them. 

       To find Ed Knapp you climb the darkened stairway to the second floor and wind your way through piles of buggy wheels and heaps of iron. Knapp will be talking over the phone to a distant manufacturer of buggy wheels, writing letters to buyers of ordered but as yet unmade buggies, or working over a stack of bills and invoices on his ancient rolltop desk. Or he may be out in the factory checking his workmen. 

       But he will still take time to talk. Perhaps he will let his work wait, because, as he says, "The buggy business isn't quite what it should be." He thinks the slump is only temporary. "No reason to think the buggy business is dead," he says. "Horses are more popular today than they have been for years. Why, we're getting orders from all over the country—from parts of the country we haven't had orders from in years. That's encouraging." 

       At sixty-five Knapp can look back on more than fifty years in the buggy business, for his father started the business and young Ed joined him at a tender age. As he sits on his desk, his feet dangling a few inches above the darkened floor, he will sketch in those years, his quiet voice stopping occasionally as he mentally places each episode in its proper sequence. Around the factory he wears a pair of gray work trousers, a blue and white striped shirt and a brown tie with somber-colored leaves falling across it. His rust-colored felt hat has a brim that time has styled into an amazing wreck. 

       "My father," Knapp says, "was a blacksmith until he got into the buggy business. A lot of blacksmiths went into buggy making in those days. My father started a buggy factory in Cincinnati, but it burned down. Then he came over here to Lawrenceburg and bought this factory. This place was a buggy factory at the time and before that it was a furniture factory. 

       "We didn't think anything of taking orders for carload lots of buggies. We could get an order for sixty- five new buggies, go to work, and have them on their way in three days. Any more, we just ship them one at a time. 

       "I started out working for my father as a salesman. I traveled in the South a lot. Our best market was with the Cajuns in Louisiana. I used to go down there a couple times a year. I would ride a train, then hire a buggy to take me around to the towns. One trip I visited forty towns and sold buggies in thirty-seven of them. Hardware stores used to handle them for us because everyone needed buggies then and the hardware stores were a good place to get them.

       "Things have changed, though, in Louisiana.” Knapp shakes his head a little as though he has trouble understanding people who no longer want good buggies. "Those Cajun farmers don't use so many buggies any more. Cotton brings a high price in the South today and farmers buy secondhand cars. 

       "Well, sir, some people ask me why I don't take some trips to Louisiana and try to sell some more buggies there. But there's a reason. Just isn't any use, cotton being as high as it is. But if they start talking about gasoline rationing they'll flock in here to buy buggies. Guess I'd rather never sell another buggy than see another war though." 

       Business was good for Standard during the Second World War. Orders for buggies came in from all parts of the country and especially from the South. "Why, they took buggies out of here," says Knapp, "with one black wheel and three red wheels. We had more than twenty people in here building buggies." It was during the war, too, that Standard for a short time faced a shutdown order from the War Production Board. The Board was prepared to classify the buggy factory as a nonessential industry until circumstances proved that even a horse-drawn buggy can contribute to a World war. A large oil company was working in back-road country of Louisiana where cars and trucks couldn't plow through the brush and mud. The company ordered a dozen sturdy buggies from Standard and the War Production Board changed its verdict. "If we hadn't been in business," says Knapp, "where would they have found those buggies? 

       "The Amish and Mennonites," says Knapp, “have always been good buggy customers for us. Their religion frowns on using automobiles, so they still use buggies. They're particular customers though," he adds. "Their buggies have to be very plain, no stripes on the wheels, and no fancy stuff. They usually order them without tops. When the young people get married they make their own buggy top." 

       The show horse world also provides a fraction of Knapp's buggy orders. And children who get new pony carts may never know it, but the carts usually come from Lawrenceburg. 

       Knapp is not a man to bear a grudge and consequently has no hard feelings about the fact that it was the automobile that pushed the hard-working, hard- riding and rattling road buggy up to the edge of oblivion. He admits that he would much rather ride an automobile than a buggy, but points out that a growing number are buggy riding for pleasure. 

       It was shortly after the First World War that the automobile business grew big and bustling at the expense of the time-tested buggy. That was the time, too, when buggy makers all across the country were deciding whether to switch to automobile manufacture or go down heroically with the buggy. William Knapp, Ed's father, thought about the new enterprise too, but young Ed talked him into staying in the buggy business. "Lots of buggy makers went broke trying to make cars,” he recalls. “The only one that made the switch successfully was Studebaker."

       The buggies turned out at Standard are all custom-made vehicles. The purchaser can take his choice of more than half a hundred models of buggies, carts, and wagons. Knapp keeps no stock models for immediate shipment. He waits until he has an order for a buggy, then puts it into production. About ten days later the buggy is ready for shipment. 

       During those ten days Knapp's six buggy makers have fashioned various parts of the vehicle from wood, leather, and steel. Each of them has worked on several parts of the buggy because, as Knapp says, "There isn't work enough to keep them all busy at the same jobs all the time." 

       The various departments are scattered over the three floors of the factory, with one or two workmen to the floor. There are stockpiles of raw materials all over the place. The floors themselves are parallel to nothing in particular, not even each other, but Knapp declares that the building is still serviceable. 

       One of the oldest and most popular models in Standard's line of vehicles is the Blue Grass Special, a one-seated runabout that was common on the country roads a half-century ago. Standard sells this model for $156. Knapp points out that buggy prices have not gone up in proportion to prices of other commodities. You can still buy a good buggy for slightly more than it cost a decade ago.

       The hickory-spoked wheels for the Blue Grass Special are made in a wheel factory in the Pennsylvania Dutch section. The wheels are shipped to Lawrenceburg without tires and steel tires are attached to them by Elza West, the blacksmith who joined Standard the day it started operations in Lawrenceburg. The wheels are then painted to please the buyer. 

       The bed for the buggy is made of oak by Louis Hunter, who has been making buggies for over half a century. His is an old craft and he does his work as carefully and thoroughly today as he ever did. The buggy body, fifty-six inches long and twenty-three inches wide, is designed and built to stay together over several thousand miles of rough country road. 

       On either end of the body is a spring to hold the buggy above the chassis and help absorb the bounce. At the front end of the buggy is the dashboard to keep the horse in the shafts from throwing mud into the face of the driver. The driver sits on an upholstered seat wide enough for two and no softer than a buggy seat ever was. The iron work that holds the top is handmade in the blacksmith shop on the first floor of the factory. The top itself is made of leather and rubber and there is a flap that hangs down to the back of the seat behind the passengers. Then for an extra price the buggy purchaser can order side curtains to keep out the cold wind and the rain or snow. He can also get oil lamps to equip the rig for night riding. Knapp thinks all this is a bargain at $156 and he is probably right-if you happen to need a buggy. 

       There is no show room at the Standard Vehicle Company. Most of the orders come in by mail. Knapp makes no special effort to show potential customers how his buggies look behind a horse, and the chances are good that he would have trouble finding a horse if asked to do so. This may be due to the fact that he doesn't like horses. "No more than I care for working horses or riding in a buggy. I sometimes wonder how got into the business I'm in. Horses scare me." 

       In addition to building buggies, Knapp does a small business in repairing them. He recently rebuilt a stagecoach that once belonged to the old Wells Fargo line. The coach is owned by a rancher in New Mexico and the rancher hauled it to Lawrenceburg on a truck. He ordered new upholstering, and repairs in the wood and iron work on the body. When it was finished he came back to Standard and loaded his stagecoach onto his truck for the trip back to the Southwest. He still uses it to haul visitors around his ranch. The citizens of Lawrenceburg, who see nothing unusual in loading yesterday's buggies on today's freight cars, were well represented, however, when the stagecoach was pushed out of the factory and loaded on the truck. 

       Knapp will make a pony cart or buggy as fancy or as plain as the customer wants it. He still builds basket carts for ponies and fancy surreys for show horses. He says that he has never made dog or goat carts because he considers these somewhat out of his line. Neither does he make racing sulkies.

       Knapp thinks his toughest days in the buggy busi- ness are past. He doesn't see how there could be tougher days than those he knew during the thirties. "Father," he recalls, "was a man who thought every- one was honest. He thought everyone was as honest as he was. When the depression came after the First World War, dozens of his debtors lost their money and eventually left him with a debt of $262,000. In- stead of going into bankruptcy he stayed in the struggle. Year by year we paid the debt off, but progress on it was mighty slow." 

       It was so slow that William Knapp died an old man a couple of years before the last of his debts were paid. He died after a hard day's work at the factory, where he spent most of his time in the blacksmith shop and not in the office. Then came the Second World War and even the buggy business prospered. Ed Knapp paid off the last of the debt after almost twenty years of nibbling. 

       Even though Knapp still makes a good living, the gross income of the factory is down now. "People are not buying buggies like they should," he says. "But times will get better. Why, we had an order from Iowa this week for a new buggy, the first order we've had from Iowa in years. Now, if that happened to you wouldn't you think you still had a chance?" 

       Knapp has one regret that clouds his life. "As I get older," he says, "I keep thinking that it's too bad I never had a son, somebody to carry on this buggy business after I'm gone. If this factory closes I don't know where people can go to buy their buggies."

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